Refactor using functools.partial

[ns-rse]

@MaxGamill-Sheffield has been looking at using functools.partial to control workflows based on OrderedDict dictionaries which can be derived from YAML configuration files.

An example of how this can work is shown in the Gist Use the functools partial function to refactor and setup a TopoStats filters pipeline by reading in an "OrderedDict"

@MaxGamill-Sheffield : It looks like the key around this is the mapping() function where the available_steps are ordered into available_steps.

The use of functools.partial() is required so that not all arguments need explicitly provided and *args / **kwargs are used instead to pass defaults (we already leverage functools.partial() in run_topostats.run_topostats.py to handle multi-processing).

Do you have any resources and other examples that informed your Gist that might be useful?

Because of the large number of outstanding issues and current work I've marked this as Low Priorit and added it to Milestone 4.